Misplaced Pages

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Old talk has been archived to Talk:Economics/Old talk

Someone wrote a bad review of economics section at kuro5hin:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2001/9/24/43858/2479/4#4

This comment could help the section to improve? joao

Not if it's from September 2001, as it appears to be. The economics section here now bears simply no resemblance to what was here then. It's now really quite good, and contains a wide variety of topic coverage. The main page economics is not good enough, among other things it simply fails to explain scarcity well enough. Someone should dig around in the older versions to find a better explanation.

Some topics I think would be worthwhile (off the top of my head):

Game theory (linking to John Nash etc), pareto optimality, exchange rate theory (pegged, float, dirty-float), Bretton Woods, Neo-Keynesian school, Milton Friedman, the Austrian School, utility theory, revealed preference, cardinality and ordinality, simple supply and demand, oligopoly / monopoly theory and competition, contestability, sunk costs, interest rates, money supply, the concept of a market, Walras and the concept of the auction, the business cycle, random walks, determinism and predictablity in economics (linking to chaos theory), financial markets, and theories of regulation and taxation.

Just linked 'em all to see which are here now (September 2003) - about half are, thankfully. Also needing to be worked in somewhere: Triple bottom line, ecosystem valuation, social welfare function, and any discussion of clearing and settlement - we've got Bank for International Settlements but no fundamental discussion of what it *does* - fiat clearing nor for credit clearing or for commodity clearing which are different again, nor creditworthiness. Some of these are finance topics but there will be overlap between list of finance topics and list of economics topics on such basic issues. Both may need to be updated to include all of the ones that exist.

Off the top of my head though - I might come back to do some of them if I've got the time. Haven't really thought about most of this stuff for a few years now ...

C

Replaced scarcity, not because it isn't in the textbooks, but because "choices under scarcity" is just a verbose defintition of "trade". I vote for clarity.

I think the point of economics is to create those verbose definitions. It's not just "choice under scarcity" but also the NATURE of choice, the NATURE of scarcity. The Fundamentals section is good but has to make this clearer, and come up front.

Why insert the notion of scarcity?

Why not the allocation of resources, period? Whether they're 'scarce' or not isn't really relevant and too often a matter of opinion. There are plenty of doctors in the US, for example, but their distribution is hardly optimal. It's economic, however.

Because the allocation of non-scarce resources is generally rather trival. If the resource is non-scarce give everyone who wants it as much as they want. In situations where it is interesting like patents and copyright, the time required to create them is scarce. As an amateur economist, I would define scarcity as something that has an opportunity cost so in that economic sense doctors are scarce since there is something else that would be useful for them to do (say like be a doctor in a different county). Jrincayc 03:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This question is just stupid. Economics is solely and only about ways to compensate for scarcity and achieve optimal distributions of scarce resources. That's all it can be.

The first sentence has no verb: "Economics (formally known as political economy) the governance of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth and the various related problems of scarcity, finance, debt, taxation, labor, law, inequity, poverty, pollution, war, etc. " ...I am going to insert the word studies for now. Feel free to fix it differently. Kingturtle 04:54, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A problem with this definition is that it is simply wrong to say that what passes for economics today includes all the studies formerly (and now in parallel) known as political economy. While there is consensus on one concept of technical economics and its methods, and on capital types, the latter has yet to be completely integrated into monetary policy, fiscal policy, accounting and such - thus there are well-defined packages of accounting reform and monetary reform that seem to have no valid reasons NOT to happen, other than the fact that someone benefits from the inertia and failure to do so. In the 20th century this exact situation led to two very nasty wars, and a third nasty confrontation over economic systems, that between them, have characterized the whole global polity and most moves towards world government. Accordingly, we are obligated to present economics in its full depth, and with its full impact on human society, and the present page simply does not do that adequately.

Hell, we're talking about distribution potentially of air, water, and food here. Hard to get more important than that.